Northern Gateway hearings were a path to self-discovery for many of its opponents

For much of his life, Murray Minchin, a 54-year-old postal worker in Kitimat, was so shy, and had such a stammer, that he was often afraid to answer the phone in his own house.

Then came the hearings for Northern Gateway, a pipeline by Enbridge which would carry bitumen from Alberta's oil fields to his hometown. The transformation of Minchin from shy recluse to articulate advocate started when he found an oil-soaked log on a beach near Kitimat. He thought about the big pipeline people had been talking about, and made a decision to get involved.

“I contemplated in my mind’s eye millions of logs here on the north coast saturated in oil, and what that would be like, and from that moment I was fully in.”

Minchin started doing some research, and going to some information sessions on the pipeline.

“People were not asking the questions I wanted them to ask. The feeling of me walking away having not asked those questions was harder to bear than forcing myself to ask them," he said.

"So once that hurdle was jumped, I was ready to jump the next one, forcing myself through hurdles I had built up over the years until at the final hearings it was a completely natural place for me to be, to stare them in the eye and make then squirm.”

When Kitimat held a plebiscite to measure whether the town supported the Northern Gateway pipeline or not, Minchin was at the centre of action, and spoke to the crowd through a megaphone once the result was announced.

Video by Mychaylo Prystupa

Minchin is proud of the fact that his young daughter was able to witness this transformation.

“She got to see me go through these lessons when she was 12, and it took me until age 50 to learn them.”

Minchin is a photographer, “a large-format black and white nature photographer.” He said Northern Gateway took him away from that, and now he’s returning to it, with a new mission.

Photo by Murray Minchin

“It has re-lit the fire in my belly to get out there and take the photos, and make them available to different groups that can use them to show the rest of Canada and the world how beautiful this place is.”

Minchin thinks one of the lasting legacies of the pipeline hearing process is the solidarity it has engendered between disparate groups in the north, and especially between First Nations and non-First Nations groups.

“It has brought an understanding, and a togetherness, for all these communities,” he said.

'The pipeline brought us together'

Jasmine Thomas agrees. She’s a 27-year-old member of the Saik’uz First Nation, part of the Yinka Dene Alliance.

“The pipeline has brought us together,” she said.

Jasmine Thomas photo from Facebook

Thomas was active not only at the hearings but in a series of First Nations' visits to the shareholders of some of the major banks, attempting to convince them that the project is "doomed”.

“As a young person being involved in this work, I've been able to find my voice and witness a nation wake up and see that this country is on a path towards energy suicide,” she said. “Many other (First Nations) people, the many people impacted by residential schools and so forth, were able to find their voice and express their concerns.”

Thomas said she was already involved in environmental issues, but the involvement with Enbridge solidified her larger view of the issue: the impacts from the tar sands and increased tanker traffic as a result of the pipeline.

The Yinka Dene Alliance Freedom Train that travelled across the country to an Enbridge shareholder meeting in Toronto in 2012 strengthened Thomas’ big-picture view further. She was on that train, which ended with a large-scale protest outside the meeting room.

“That was one of the biggest moments of my life -- to march down those streets with thousands of folks from all backgrounds," she said. "It really uplifted our communities to see that as far east as Toronto there is a lot of support.”

Inspired by First Nations' resistance

Some of that new support for First Nations came from Dave Shannon, a retired metallurgical engineer in Kitimat who explained to the Joint Review panel that there were scientific flaws in the construction of the tankers proposed by Enbridge.

“What really got me started on Northern Gateway was a First Nations energy summit in 2009 at Moricetown,” he said. “I was impressed by the eloquence of the First Nations people speaking, so I said, ‘I am going to get behind them and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them.’"

What drew Shannon to that event in Moricetown in the first place was the federal government’s changes to the Navigable Waters Act and erosion of environmental legislation to facilitate the approval of pipeline projects. So he started studying Northern Gateway and went to the hearings as an intervenor, on his own behalf and for the group Douglas Channel Watch.

Dave Shannon with Cheryl Brown from Douglas Channel Watch

Shannon said all this was new, and that he had never done anything remotely activist before.

“This took three years out of my life," he said. I worked a 40-hour week for three years on this for no pay, and I put a lot of money into it. A thousand hours of research. I learned a lot."

“I learned that industry rules. Big oil will do anything to get their project approved. I saw a lot of concealment of truth by a lot of the experts from Enbridge. It made me steam, I was pretty mad.”

He said it was an eye-opener how limited the scope of the hearings was—that interveners were not allowed to talk about the tar sands, cumulative effects, LNG, greenhouse gases or global warming.

“I was somewhat naïve in thinking we had a chance," he said. "I know now that we did not...but a person has to speak up,” said Shannon.

Curiosity hardened into opposition

Minchin, Thomas, and Shannon are all modest people. They don’t seem intent on putting themselves forward. They would rather talk about the pipeline or about their communities than about themselves. And they are quick to mention about how community groups from across the north, strangers before Northern Gateway, came to know and support each other.

The activism on the coast reverberated through BC to Fort St. James, a northern community around a seven hour drive from Kitimat.

Brenda Gouglas of the Fort St. James Sustainability Group said her work was inspired by Douglas Channel Watch, and in particular by Murray Minchin.

“That group was the same as our group—people from a little town. We felt their strength, to go forward and not be afraid and ask our questions,” she said.

Brenda Gouglas, in red jacket.

Gouglas spoke about her findings in and around Fort St. James, where she was a municipal councillor for two terms until 2011. She also asked sharp questions about Canadian jobs and First Nations' benefits to Enbridge president John Carruthers and Enbridge gas president Janet Holder at the Northern Gateway panel.

As a researcher, she said she was struck by the sheer volume of information available.

“It is astounding, and the regular person does not have time for it. I retired from the Ministry of Forests in 2011, so that gave me the time.”

As for marching in the streets, that came easy for Gouglas, even though she had never done anything like it before.

“I made the banner in that photograph,” she said. “It was very empowering to put the words on a piece of fabric and walk about town. You would not believe the honks and waves and cheers we got as we walked through the community—a really good feeling.

“It seems that the ones who are afraid to go out in public like that are the ones that are in favour of the pipeline. There are some and we can have chats in the aisle at the grocery store, and people will question why I'm against it and we can talk, but there is not enough of that kind of conversation going on. I’m not sure why people don’t talk to each other like that more often,” she said.

She said being involved in the hearings was an eye-opener, “not just about Enbridge but the industry itself, seeing how they operate. They are all the same in the way they do business, in the way they present themselves to the public, the language they use.

“Last night I went to Spectra Energy open house proposing LNG, and their language and their slides and their presentation seemed word for word the same as what Enbridge was presenting. Buzzwords. You cannot get away from the word ‘mitigation’ no matter which way you turn. ‘World class’ is another.”

Gouglas said she found the federal government's approval in a press release last month "cowardly" and that she won’t stop researching and speaking out abut the project any time soon.

“This is not over. Whether or not it is approved we have to start looking at what will happen on the land. I have learned so much about what the industry behaves like during construction. There is so much that we need to keep our finger on.”

“There’s a sense of ‘we are all in this together.’ It’s an incredible feeling.”